System and method for unsupervised detection and gleason grading of prostate cancer whole mounts using NIR fluorscence

1. A method for unsupervised classification of histological images of prostatic tissue, comprising the steps of: providing histological image data obtained from a slide simultaneously co-stained with NIR fluorescent and Hematoxylin-and-Eosin (H&E) stains; segmenting prostate gland units in the image data; forming feature vectors by computing discriminating attributes of the segmented gland units; and using said feature vectors to train a multi-class classifier within a Bayesian framework, wherein said classifier is arranged to classify prostatic tissue into benign, prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PIN), and Gleason scale adenocarcinoma grades 1 to 5 categories and to use Bayesian posterior probabilities to determine a strength of a diagnosis, wherein a borderline prognosis between two categories is provided to a second phase classifier using a classification model whose parameters are tuned to the two categories of the borderline prognosis.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein said classifier is trained to detect a most prominent and a second most prominent pattern in said image data, and to compute a Gleason score as a sum of Gleason grades of said patterns.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein said classifier is trained using a multi-class support vector machine using a probabilistic interpretation of the classifier output.

4. The method of claim 1 , wherein said classifier is trained using a multi-class boosting algorithm using a probabilistic interpretation of the classifier output.

5. The method of claim 1 , wherein said slide is co-stained with an AMACR biomarker.

6. The method of claim 1 , wherein said discriminating attributes include boundary and region descriptors, structural descriptors, and texture descriptors.

7. A program storage device readable by a computer, tangibly embodying a program of instructions executable by the computer to perform the method steps for unsupervised classification of histological images of prostatic tissue, said method comprising the steps of: providing histological image data obtained from a slide simultaneously co-stained with NIR fluorescent and Hematoxylin-and-Eosin (H&E) stains; segmenting prostate gland units in the image data; forming feature vectors by computing discriminating attributes of the segmented gland units; and using said feature vectors to train a multi-class classifier within a Bayesian framework, wherein said classifier is arranged to classify prostatic tissue into benign, prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PIN), and Gleason scale adenocarcinoma grades 1 to 5 categories and to use Bayesian posterior probabilities to determine a strength of a diagnosis, wherein a borderline prognosis between two categories is provided to a second phase classifier using a classification model whose parameters are tuned to the two categories of the borderline prognosis.

8. The computer readable program storage device of claim 7 , wherein said classifier is trained to detect a most prominent and a second most prominent pattern in said image data, and to compute a Gleason score as a sum of Gleason grades of said patterns.

9. The computer readable program storage device of claim 7 , wherein said classifier is trained using a multi-class support vector machine using a probabilistic interpretation of the classifier output.

10. The computer readable program storage device of claim 7 , wherein said classifier is trained using a multi-class boosting algorithm using a probabilistic interpretation of the classifier output.

11. The computer readable program storage device of claim 7 , wherein said slide is co-stained with an AMACR biomarker.

12. The computer readable program storage device of claim 7 , wherein said discriminating attributes include boundary and region descriptors, structural descriptors, and texture descriptors.